The present invention relates to the field of communication forums and email notifications sent for postings to communication forums.
Many communication forums exist where users can submit posts, view posts from others, and respond to posts from others. These communication forums are often managed by a collaboration server. The communication forums may be accessible via a Web browser accessing a Web site served by the collaboration server or may be accessible through a client-side application interface linked to the collaboration server. The collaboration server can be a chat server, a workflow management system server, a project management server, a software configuration management server, an intranet server, and the like.
Regardless of the specific nature of the collaboration server, one feature of the collaboration server may include email notifications, which are generated by postings and/or responses to postings submitted to the communication forum. System users may receive overwhelming volumes of these notifications, which decreases their effectiveness.
For example, an IBM Rational Team Concert® server is a collaboration server (specifically a software configuration management server, for permitting a team to collaborate on work items). Using the server, one or more colleagues can provide a comment or description for a specific work item, where each work item is often a software defect or issue to be resolved by a collaborating team. These comments or descriptions on work items may be considered (for purposes of this disclosure) posts to the communication forum. IBM Rational Team Concert® permits a “mail configuration”, which sends an email notification to a user based on notification generating actions linked to the communication forum. For example, an email notification can be sent when new comments are added to a work item, when a summary or description of a work item is changed, when a severity, priority, or planned for attribute of a work item is changed, when an owner of a work items is changed, when a subscriber is added or removed to a work item, and the like. It is not unusual for some developers to receive fifty email notifications a day from an IBM Rational Team Concert® server. Business developers, receiving fifty email messages from the collaboration server, often ignore these messages or give them a decreased urgency, which results in these developers not being timely informed about important items.